The IT department is pleased to report that our Instructional Computing Facility in Kresge LL-19 (computer lab) will re-open for business as usual on Monday, November 24.

Our Media and Educational Technology Services (METS) staff will return to their offices within ICF LL-19.

The majority of the I/T Dept. staff however will likely remain in our temporary locations at Landmark, FXB, and Smith Street until the construction project in LL-6 adjacent to our LL-15 office suite is completed.

We thank the entire SPH community for your patience and understanding during the past 3 weeks, and we apologize for the tremendous inconvenience this closure may have caused you.

Due to construction that will begin in mid-July on Landmark Center 3rd Floor East, staff members currently at Landmark Center will be relocated to 33 Wigglesworth Street from July 10 through December.

Staff members relocating to Wigglesworth include:

Taso Markatos

Caryn D’Agostino

Deane Eastwood

Alex Garcia

David Marshall

Guillaume Molter

Brian Pedranti

Andy Ross

Anne Marie Stathis

Laurie Sutherland

Christopher Ternan

Nate Varney

Kevin Wnek

There is no change to Helpdesk or Media and Educational Technology Services (METS) teams. The Helpdesk and these staff members remain in Kresge LL. The Helpdesk may also be reached via phone at 617-432-HELP or via email at helpdesk@hsph.harvard.edu.

Thank you for the outstanding turnout at today’s Tech Day. Hundreds of HSPH community members stopped by to learn about Office 365, VDI, Canvas, new Dell products, BlueJeans video conferencing, Mediasite course capture, and responsive web design. Dozens participated in tours of our new distance learning and video production studios and the HSPH server room.

We raffled off a number of items that IT staff members are excited about.

Summer is an ideal time to look through your site and make sure that everything is shipshape for the upcoming school year. The WebTeam has developed tools to help you identify problems and has suggestions for addressing these problems to make your site shine for the fall. Below are solutions to three common website issues – broken links, typos, and images that lack alt text.

Broken Links

Broken links happen. You may have linked long ago to a site that’s now deleted or has since been updated. Such broken links adversely affect your search rankings on Google and are also very frustrating to users who can’t find the content they’re seeking. To help you find and fix broken links, the Broken Link Checker tool on your site’s dashboard will do all the hard work for you. And if you’re one of the primary site administrators, you’ll also be receiving email notifications about broken links on your site.

We all occasionally make typos. Unfortunately, typos on websites are there for the world to see and detract from a site’s overall professionalism. To rid your site of typos, you can use the Proofreading tool that’s built into the editor on your dashboard. Just click on the button in the top toolbar and, similar to Microsoft Word, red and green underlines will appear in your text, allowing you to spot issues and correct them.

When inserting images into your site, always fill in the boxes for title and alt text. Alt text, which stands for “Alternative Text,” is important for people with visual disabilities because screen readers use it to describe what is in a picture. Google also uses the alt text to determine what a picture contains, allowing people to search for images based on keywords. To create alt tags, try to write no more than one-sentence descriptions that are detailed but not wordy. For example, for a picture of soccer on the med school quad, you could write the following alt tag: “Students play soccer on the Harvard Medical School quad on a beautiful summer afternoon.” The sentence is concise yet fully describes what the photo shows.

The HSPH web team has a great WordPress training session coming up to help you answer all your website questions.

November 22nd at 10:00 AM
Kresge 209

If you want to brush up on your WordPress skills or just need to learn how to edit your site, this session is for you.

The training will cover many of the basic WordPress features, including how to edit pages, add images, and configure menus. It will be hands-on in a computer lab, so you can maximize your learning as you follow along.

Paperless forms streamline the user account process. Just log in to the site, choose your task, and fill out the form. That’s pretty much it. No need to hand-deliver anything to IT.

Paperless forms also decrease the environmental impact of our day to day operations.

Do I have to wait until the user’s first day to submit the form?

Not at all. In fact we encourage submitting the form up to 30 days in advance!

Once you complete the form the user receives a temporary login to choose their HSPH username. They can do so from any computer with an internet connection. After that, their account should be ready in a few days.

What are the steps to make a new account?

Log in and fill out the new account form

You will receive an email, with a temporary login, to forward to the new user

The user utilizes the temporary login to pick a HSPH login from a dropdown list of 4-5 and accept the user terms.

An Origin ticket is created with the complete information in your name. and an email confirmation is sent to you with all details of the request.

Safe Links and Browsing – When your readers see a http://t.co or http://goo.gl links it is hard to tell whether the website they will be redirected to is going to be a reputable one. Since hsph.me only allows .harvard.edu links your readers can feel safe when clicking on your short links.

Long Term Use and Support – At any time Twitter and Google can choose to discontinue this service and if you are using theirs then your short links are gone. Since hsph.me is run by the Information Technology Department we can ensure length of the service and can address issues related to it more quickly.

How do I shorten my links?

All you need to do is head over to http://hsph.me and paste in any .harvard.edu link to get your short link. For more information please visit the hsph.me terms of use page.